56k Times Five: Myth Or Moneymaker? 529
maxentius writes "InternetNews.com has an article on not-broadband-but-still-faster telephone internet access premiering soon in more than one commercial ISP venue. Compression and other techniques will improve speed by up to five times, so they say. Hi-tech or hogwash?"
By the time this is availible... (Score:2, Interesting)
I can tie up the phone line and go slowly (faster, but still slow) for a little less then to get the real thing. No thanks.
Re:By the time this is availible... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It's available now. (Score:2, Interesting)
They are claiming 3x the performance -- "if your modem gets 52k, 3XS will increase it up to 156k." Hrm... Costs regular dialup account price plus $8/month. So almost $30/month.
I think it is pretty dumb as regular HTML isn't all that bad. I only get highly annoyed when I'm downloading software or viewing largish binary data like
Myth (Score:5, Insightful)
Nice Idea, but doesn't really do what it says on the tin.
Re:Myth (Score:5, Interesting)
I think you're probably correct. You can always enable HTML compression at the web server and web clients that "understand" it will see better performance. We started using it where I work for mobile devices connected to our intranet, but we were disappointed by the results -- mostly because the images being downloaded (the bulk of the data) were already compressed and the HTML compression had a negligible impact on performance. I would anticipate similar issues if the technology Earthlink is using is the same. Redhat.com and Yahoo.com will download pretty fast. Viewing the latest photos on your family website will still be an exercise in patience.
Re:Myth (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Myth (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't see anything new and given the fact that telcos internally encode analog lines at 64k I don't see much more improvement there either given that an 8k loss in the analog to digital conversion and back again is extrordinarily small when you think about it.
Modems and compression (Score:2)
As modems have tiny little CPUs in them, and very little memory, the V.44 and other compression schemes they use are not very effective. Zip, Compress, and other host-based compressions algorithms which require much more memory and cpu than V.44 and friends always compress much better than the modem's compression.
Re:Myth (Score:5, Informative)
What will be accelerated
All text - HTML, markup, and javascript
Most graphics & photos - including jpeg and gif images and most Flash images and animation
Most banner ads
All browser-based emails
All emails that contain images - even when read in a dedicated email program
What will *not* be accelerated
Streaming media, and audio and video files
Secure pages, such as those used for online banking and credit card forms
MP3 files and executable programs
Re:Myth (Score:5, Funny)
Boy, I can't wait to download those even faster!
Re:Myth (Score:4, Insightful)
Speaking of such, does anyone know of a good was to screen out Flash animations?
Re:Myth (Score:2)
Re:Myth (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Myth (Score:2)
How about by not having the Flash plugin installed?
Re:Myth (Score:5, Funny)
If you're an IE user, you get nagged to death.
"Would you like to install this piece of software?"
[NO]
[Click on a link]
"Would you like to install this piece of software?"
[NO]
[Click on a link]
"Would you like to install this piece of software?"
[GUNSHOT]
That's the nasty thing about auto-installing plugins like ActiveX controls. They always send the request to be installed without any knowledge that they were turned down earlier. I wouldn't blame MS for this either. Back in the dot-com days, web developers thought their audience was incredibly incompetant when it came to using computers. If they didn't have an auto-installer, they wouldn't use it for fear that some wanker couldn't figure out how to hit save and okay a couple of times. Thanks to popular demand, this stupid auto-install feature was born.
So that's why uninstalling it doesn't fix it.
Re:Myth (Score:2)
dl the pref bar and use the kill flash button whenever a flash bugs you. You can also tell the prefbar not to allow your webbrowser to dl javascripts or images, as well as you it to fool webpages into thinking you're actuall using IE (isntead of moz). VERY useful tool.
JPEG2000 is done (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.jpeg.org/JPEG2000.html
I'm really looking forward to JPEG2000 for digital cameras, since instead of having to cache thumbnails, applications like iPhoto can just decode the wavelet subbands appropraite for the current resolution. Much faster than having to decod
Forget it for dynamic content. (Score:2)
In other words, dynamic content won't be accellerated. And may be corrupted, if the proxy doesn't recognize that it's changed.
time to compress (Score:2)
Re:time to compress (Score:2)
How do you send compressed html from a web page? I am confused. HTML is just text, why would you compress that?
HTTP standard supports compression (Score:2)
I think just about all modern browsers support this automatically, it's just a matter of doing the compression on the web server side. I'm not sure how many clients automatically send out the header in
Re:time to compress (Score:5, Informative)
Presumably, identity is standard uncompressed text. The others indicate its willingness to accept gzipped files from the webserver.
Since HTML is text, you have a GUARANTEE of 1/8th space savings. Since HTML tends to use a lot of similar codes, the space savings are, in all likelihood, far greater. Since on dialup, the latency of compression is trivial in comparison to the limitations of bandwidth, this may help substantially.
Web-server compression makes sense to me.
Then again, there are PPP extensions for compression now too. These would have a similar benefit.
Combined with both an off-site connection proxy and an on-site data proxy (this is what their webpage suggests they base their technology on), you get the enhancement they claim, more or less (not for compressed files or raw data transfer though).
Re:time to compress (Score:2)
Read the Article (Score:4, Informative)
Email speed will stay the same.
Downloading compressed files will stay the same.
Browsing will be somewhat faster, but 7x is a stretch.
More than anything, I bet most of those $28.95/mo customers will be paying for the privilege of ~5min support response calls.
Definitely file this one into the "Hype" category of Hogwash.
Re:Read the Article (Score:2)
Thats not a very good number...
[The last time I used thier web/java-based instant message service and I was in and out in 10 minutes wi
Re:Read the Article (Score:2)
I personally think they have some good ideas.
Persistant Connections
Caching
Diff'ing against the unchanged data you already have
Compression
But -- I have been on broadband for so long -- what do I know
Re:Read the Article (Score:2)
In fact, unless there is some bypass mechanism, it is likely to degrade slightly. Unless the compression is streaming, there will be a need to buffer blocks of data, which will cause delays. And if the compression is streaming, it is likely to increase the size of compressed files slightly.
This can be mitigated by recognizing highly random data sources such as compressed or encrypted files. Of course, this is being sold to a broad market. It will be o
Not FTP, either... or Terminal Services, or... (Score:2)
Email normally compressed? (Score:2)
Still, this is obvious enough that I imagine at least some mail systems must be gzipping the connection.
This being Slashdot, I'm sure someone knows all about this. I'd love to hear details about where and how compressed mail is used.
Won't work... (Score:4, Informative)
This makes it impossible to cram more than 64Kbps into a phone call. Sure, you can compress the data, but once data is already compressed (as images, movies, and other things people usually want fat bandwidth for), it can't be compressed anymore.
Unless they dramatically change the analog phone network, which won't happen, this is a pipe dream. Sorry guys.
Re:Won't work... (Score:2)
I beleive the limit is actually 56Kbps not 64Kbps. Hence the limit of current modems to 56Kbps. IIRC the FCC throttles that down to 53Kbps to make sure the rest of the channel is used for error correction. So if your ISP advertises 56K connections they are
Re:Won't work... (Score:2)
The whole 53K Vs 56K thing only matters until your analog call gets converted to digital and placed on the phone network. Which can happen as far as your local central office or as close as your phone pole. After that it's delivered to your ISP via T1 (or T3, or even a simpl
I figured it out - (Score:5, Funny)
Sounds cool, but in reality it's just Lynx for OSX.
Re:I figured it out - (Score:3, Informative)
It saves the costly 3-way TCP handshake on the slow modem connection by installing a local side proxy. The proxy makes a couple permanent TCP connections to a squid proxy on the other end. I know for a fact propel uses squid on the server side. If the content is cached you save 1.5 * ping time to server for every request to that server.
possibly... (Score:4, Informative)
Speed vs. Time (Score:4, Informative)
Your MP3s and bad porn will still come across just as slow on your gnutella client. Sorry.
-Chris
Haven't I heard this before? (Score:4, Interesting)
Caching and compression != high speed Internet (Score:2, Interesting)
While bandwidth heavy pages that happen to be compressible MIGHT load faster, access won't be always-on, and will be miserable if shared between 2 or more users...
Just a reseller deal. (Score:2, Interesting)
5:1 Compression...I Think Not (Score:2, Informative)
Oh greeaaaaaat.... (Score:2)
So yay, the text part of a webpage comes a little faster. So that 10k or so of HTML is 5x faster.
Those images, MP3s, streaming video, and all that are all already compressed (normally lossy at that)... I doubt they're gonna do much with that. And why on earth do you want something more than dialup if you're not using high-bandwidth applications?
What's sad is that people will actually pay extra for this.
Lzip Compression (Score:3, Funny)
http://lzip.sourceforge.net/
Content on the web is already compressed (Score:2)
How does something like this work for things that are already compressed, like, say, anything that passes through mod_gzip, a V.44 modem connection,
The only ways I can think of to speed things further, at least in the case of images, is to resize cached copies, like AOL does, and that's just not a pleasant id
Images are already compressed. (Score:2)
Images constitute most of the data being downloaded. HTML is text- it's very small compared to images.
JPG, GIF, and PNG are already compressed as far as is practical.
So this technique is only compressing the HTML text. No big deal, and NO WAY 5X speed improvements.
Re:Images are already compressed. (Score:2)
Hmm (Score:3, Funny)
huh? (Score:2)
want faster connections but aren't willing to pay for broadband
willing to pay for broadband? More like "unable to get broadband". Even though Broadband prices are quite steep, it's usually not a deterrant. No, the fact that most people have no choice is the real problem.
Now, put that in the context of the article. Who do you know that can't get broadband but can get a good dialup connection? Most of the time if a person can't get broadband, they can't get over 26K dialup e
Answer: (Score:2)
The pipe is only so big (Score:2)
The fact is that when you pull big data files that are already compressed, you can't do much to improve things. You are stuffing 8 great tomatoes into the itty-bitty can already
In other news... (Score:2)
Reduces the amount of data sent downstream? (Score:2)
Sounds suspicious at best. After all if it looks like crap and smells like crap, you shouldn't taste it.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
they'll pass your test easily! (Score:4, Insightful)
The vast majority of 56k modems already do compression, CSLIP compresses headers [freesoft.org], and HTML compression is already built into modern browsers [webreference.com]. What's left is caching, image-size/quality reduction, and pop-up blocking. AOL already does two of those three - take a guess which two!!
Re:Try my test. (Score:3, Interesting)
Most text files compress extremely well, I frequently see
Cmprsss txt b rmvng ll vwls (Score:5, Funny)
Thy smply rmv ll f th vwls n th txt. Ths wy thy cn gt a hghr cmprssn rt.
Thnk f t ths wy: Thy cn cmprss t 11. The thr gys cn nly cmprss t 10. S, 11 s bttr thn 10.
Re:Cmprsss txt b rmvng ll vwls (Score:5, Funny)
eieoeaoueoeieoeoauoeoaoeoaoueoaoeuoaaaaaaaaaa
Re:Cmprsss txt b rmvng ll vwls (Score:3, Funny)
There's prior art for this. AOL IM and Yahoo's YM already do this.
user: h
me: hello.
user: wen r u gonna fix bug xxxx?
me: I'm working on it.
user: teh bug sux.
me: I know, I'll get to it soon.
user: k. syl.
me: see you later.
More Compression Tricks (Score:3, Funny)
Bright sites, unfortunately, show very little improvements.
ZDNet Review of Propel Software Accelerator (Score:2)
Editors' Rating 9.0
Interface and ease of use 10
Installation and setup 10
Service and support 7
Performance 9
Features 9
For years, frustrated Netizens have sought new ways to eke out a few more bits per second from their poky 56K connections. Most speed-up schemes (modem doublers, caching programs, and registry optimizers, such as Internet Rocket) generate a lot of hype but little else. Propel Software, on the other hand, offers a
hogwash.. (Score:2)
nope (Score:2)
Ziproxy anyone? (Score:2)
Actually I myself have been meaning to set it up for myself...
-Benjamin Meyer
Its snake oil (Score:2)
What is evil is all of their customers and customer's customer's traffic is run though their servers. Just wait unti a customer stubles up
It's the hardware stupid (Score:2)
advertising hype (Score:2)
They're claiming it will run 5x faster than 56k modem. Well, the thing is they're only employing compression technology to web pages.
So, it's still running at 56k. But webpages may download up to 5x faster, depending on their content.
The speed is the same, it's just web content is compressed. Which means if you get kazaa happy just thinking of this, remember that the compression is not going to compress content f
IIRC, Aol already does something similar... (Score:2)
By converting the images into a lossy, 256 color format. Yes, the webpage loads faster, but the images are limited to the color depth at which they're displayed. Basically, if you view a web page in 256 color mode, a true color image will be downgraded to 256 color mode. Which means that if you save the image, and later switch to a true color mode, you're still stuck with a pixelated 256 color image.
Also, while compressing html might be a good idea for viewing webpages only, it still won't help when
Myth or Moneymaker? (Score:3, Insightful)
Last Gasp of a Dying Business Plan (Score:2)
Meaning that your bandwidth remains at the same pokey 53K it always was.
Meaning that you don't wait for banner ads - they get downloaded in the background while the modem's idle.
Meaning it's nothing more than glorified adware/spyware.
Meaning it's the same crap you get spammed for every day.
On one hand, you've got the snake oil advertized
Re:Last Gasp of a Dying Business Plan (Score:2)
Nope. I'm a very heavy dialup user, but I'm not better off with broadband. Cable modem requires me to get basic cable service, which I don't have or want. So in actuality, it's closer to $50-70/month. DSL requires me to get a land line,
Encouraging bad web pages. (Score:2)
EarthLink Plus uses a proprietary "Web Accelerator" from Propel Software which reduces the size of Web pages and elements sent to users' browsers.
Okay, this is almost on-topic, but if 70% of pages weren't coded so badly with poor html tools that fill html code with useless extra text, textual parts of the web would load probably 5 times faster anyway.
Christ, the simple proper use of CSS instead of old-school font tags can reduce a page's size considerably. And you're browser will probably render it q
This doesn't actually speed up the line (Score:2)
It works because it eliminates the expensive TCP socket creation and teardown process for every web request. If you look at a website that has 10 images on it you'll need to make 11 connections to the web server (assuming keepalive isn't enabled on the client or server). If you are on a dialup link with a ping time of 200m
not really faster internet, just web pages (Score:2)
So, basically they use some compression and caching over the last mile to make web pages pop up faster. I wonder how many web sites won't work properly with the caching part of this.
This won't make any difference for internet games or other non web applications. Just having web developers take out all the unneeded whitespace out of web pages would probably h
This is old news to wireless users (Score:2)
Three years ago, I had a CDPD (Cellular Digital Packet Data - 19.2 kbps) Internet connection for my contract work. While I could do anything anywhere, it was slow - slower than a 28.8 modem, as should be obvious.
Fortunately for me, my wireless ISP offered a Venturi [fourelle.com] proxy. Routing web browsing, POP3, etc. through it, while still slow, became more bearable.
Retrieving log data (easily compressible) through the Venturi proxy had incredible speedups. For some tasks, the compression proxy made me feel like I
Why this will go nowhere (Score:2)
More than one company doing this... (Score:2)
These guys [arteraturbo.com] are mainly going at SOHO and SMB markets through local resellers, they claim DSL speed with their proprietary system(derived from MidPoint?) [sun.com] and they have a free trial [arteraturbo.com] These are the same folks that brough out the Gekko flat-panel speakers [cheshome.com] that were hot for a while, and who do noise reduction on some jets and headsets [nct-active.com]... Oh, and don't forget to check Google [google.com]
Sooo. I guess the overwhelmingly popular question will be "who has tried it"... I'll ignore the "faster pron" jokes that should show up
it's already obsolete (Score:2)
Sounds unimpressive (Score:2)
On top of that, it could increase loss of quality since I'd imagine they'd be using lossy compression on
From Propels website (Score:5, Insightful)
* Compression. Propel Accelerator delivers text and graphics more efficiently, using a proprietary compression technology
This won't work with already compressed images unless it reduces the quality or resolution.
* Caching. Propel Accelerator intelligently retains and re-uses Web pages and page elements that have previously been sent to your PC. That's why the longer Propel Accelerator is in use on your PC, the faster your Web pages will load.
Nothing a simple proxy server doesn't already do. It may do pre-fetching of links but that won't improve the net throughput of your pipe.
* Persistent Connections. Propel Accelerator uses proprietary techniques to carefully manage and optimize the communication between your modem and our network of servers through a persistent connection. This eliminates the time wasted re-establishing and closing TCP/IP connections.
Internet Explorer already got in trouble by doing this. Leaving the TCP/IP connect unclosed violates standard practices and will only improve web speed if the server is running IIS since it expects IE to do this same trick.
Overall it's all really just a bunch of caching with maybe some pre-fetching thrown in. Just up your browsers cache settings and enable Mozilla's multiple pipe feature and you're set.
Nothing but a waste of money.
Not that outrageous (Score:3, Insightful)
What if they have a better compression algorithm that makes the image smaller while retaining quality? JPEG is widespread and standardized but it is not "king" in terms of modern image compression performance. They probably have a transcoder which translates between JPEG and whatever their proprietary format is, with as little degradation as possible. Even a 5-10% savings would make a difference.
Leaving the TCP/I
Old hat for some ISPs (Score:2)
I call it a crock (Score:2)
And no, I'm not talking about Fry's. But.. "DSL Buster?" heh.
Sorry, modems are still slow.
Figure it out (Score:2)
If we assume their example,
56K Times 5 = Moneymaker
5(56Kb/s)=MM
280Kb/s=MM
280Kb=MMs
and since s/b is actually
So it's a compression format... (Score:2)
-Restil
56kb modems already use compression (Score:2)
How does it work? (Score:4, Informative)
Nothing magic. It compresses a whole page, images and all, on the ISP side, and sends it down a persistant pipe to your client, along with some more intelligent caching information than is default (ie, the
It would probably 'look' faster since the whole page is delivered in one package, and renders all at once, rather than having text and waiting for images to show up.
It only accelerates HTTP AFAIK, so it's useless for anyone but the mom and pop web browser. It's certainly no substitute for bandwidth. The joe users buy broadband for P2P and streaming video and VPNs, none of which this 'technology' helps.
It also sounds like it would require client side software. Support? "Windows 98/NT 4.0/2000/ME/XP (sorry, no Macintosh support yet." which goes without saying.
Which brings me to a question. I regularly route my web browsing through my squid proxy at home (through ssh). Since my home uplink is 15k, it throttles my browsing. Is there an open source clone of this, or something similar?
won't help with modern modems (Score:3, Interesting)
The software solution may seem to help with some computer setups, but that's because many computers are misconfigured: a 56k modem with compression needs to be hooked up to the computer at 230kbps or 460kbps because when the modem performs the decompression, it will need to send a high-speed data stream to the computer. The best solution for those high data rates is to just get a modern USB modem.
This is for "Joe User" out there (Score:2)
If you are a Linux user:
du -h
Tar and gzip the folder, then do a vdir on it.
What do you see? Same size? Possibly even larger?
If you are a Windows user:
Right click and get properties on a folder full of mp3s or oggs.
Zip it up and compare the zip file's size with the size of the original folder.
Again, what do you see? Same size? Possibly even larger?
Like someon
Example of how one service like this works (Score:2)
http://bermangraphics.com/tips/vision.htm [bermangraphics.com]
Nothing new here, move along... (Score:2, Insightful)
For the image recompression, they can also convert the image to B&W (user setting) for additional compression. Based on this, I would say the 7x faster web page download is possi
Here we go again.... (Score:3, Funny)
Same Name... Different Markets (Score:3, Funny)
Propel Fitness Water [propelwater.com] = "Turbocharged" Water
We're doomed.
5:1? Assuming no mod_gzip! (Score:2)
And for images, they're presumably just reencoding them at a higher compression ratio, ala AOL. Which can work if you prefer crappy quality, faster.
But TANSTAAFL always applies.
Not going to eat into the broadband market (Score:2)
Earthlink is right, this is a step towards a better dialup but with no risk of taking a chunk out of their Comcast DSL market.
I can't think of any reason why HTML compression and intelligent caching can't be used in a broadband connection to make that 1 second reload of slashdot a
It's mostly snakeoil, but not completely (Score:5, Insightful)
5x dialup speeds is based on 28.8kbps speeds (Score:3, Informative)
Re:WEB acceleration only (Score:2)
Re:Dineros ? (Score:2)
Re:Too expensive (Score:2)
If you have a product, and a cheap version of that product, most users will buy the cheap version.
If you have a product, a cheap version and a middle priced version, most users will buy the middle priced one because it's cheaper than the expensive one and supposedly better than the cheaper one.
People are gullible. The difference between the mid-range and low end product can be as subtle as packaging.
Re:$28.95 per month (Score:2)
Re:well this is good (Score:2)
Hmmm. You don't understand Shannon or bandwidth very well, or 56K technology.
Bandwidth on a pure analogue line is about 3kHz (typically 3400Hz); you have to consider the signal-to-noise ratio as well before you can give the theoretical limit. A typical S/N will be around 30dB, so you plug that in to Shannon's equation: Channel capacity = 2 * 3400 * log2(1+ 30) = 33688 bits per second.
56K technology is different; the upstream limit is still the theoretical 33.6Kbps as above. The downstream limit is 56